Free The Honey Queen by Cathy Kelly Page B

cotton blouse. Peggy leaned back, letting him touch her, wanting him to.
    But then he paused, took a step away from her, leaving her staring up at him, lost.
    ‘I’m sorry. Is this too fast?’ he asked. ‘It has to be right, Peggy. I don’t want to rush you. You’re too special, do you understand?’
    Peggy had looked up at those azure eyes, darker now with desire.
    He wanted it to be right for her. He wanted her to be happy, not rushed. How beautiful that was.
    She reached for his hands and pulled them back to her blouse.
    ‘It’s right,’ she said softly. She laid her palms on either side of his face and drew his mouth to hers.
    Peggy woke in David’s bed, wrapped in his arms, the duvet tangled around them. Outside it was still dark. She didn’t know what time it was, but she felt no panic at being somewhere different – only a sense of rightness at being beside him, a feeling she could honestly say she’d never felt before.
    He was sleeping deeply and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness she could make out his profile against the pale colour of his sheets. She had been to bed with other men, but she realized now that with them it had just been sex. Sometimes wonderful sex, she knew, but it had been purely mechanical. Bodies merging in mutual need, and when the lust was slaked, both parties had been happy to go their own way.
    But this …
    Peggy closed her eyes again and snuggled against David’s warm body. In sleep, he shifted so that he was wrapped more closely around her and she relaxed into the sensation. They hadn’t had sex, they’d made love. There had been lust
and
tenderness, true closeness, and now that she’d experienced it, Peggy knew the difference. If she stayed with David, she could have this. She could come home and lie in his arms at night: loved and sated. She could tell him about her day and he’d touch her face gently, and be glad or sad for her, depending on the circumstances. He would be her support in all things and Peggy, who’d had no experience of such a thing in her entire life, began to cry silently at the thought of what had to be done.
    She hadn’t told him about her background, for all that he’d asked her. She hadn’t told anyone.
    He’d asked her to lunch with his parents, but there was no way Peggy could go, she knew that. She should never have slept with David. She should never have gone out with him. Right at the beginning, she’d known that he was different from all the other men she’d been with. He was a good man. And she was …
    Well, she wasn’t able for that sort of relationship. He
would
want two-point-five kids and the white picket fence, and Peggy couldn’t do that. She didn’t know
how
. She would mess it all up because you did what you’d grown up with, right?
    Silently, she slid out of the bed and picked up her discarded clothes. She dressed in the bathroom, then tiptoed quietly downstairs. David’s wallet and keys were on the coffee table. She’d leave a note there, better to do that than go back upstairs with it and risk him being awake. She found a scrap of paper and a pen, and wrote:
    David, I’m sorry but I can’t go out with you any more. You are a lovely guy and you deserve to be happy. Just not with me. It would be easier for us both if you don’t contact me. Please don’t come to the shop.
    No hard feelings,
    Peggy
    She slipped the note into his wallet, so he’d find it easily, then left. It was the right thing to do.
    Her priority should be the shop, she told herself as she drove home in the yellow glow of the streetlights. She had no time for someone like David. There could be no place in her life for him. She knew that and it was easier to end things now, before it went horribly wrong, which it would. It was bound to. So why was she crying?

Chapter Three
    S itting at the scarred wooden desk in front of the small window of her eyrie on St Brigid’s Terrace, Freya Bryne was smiling. She was reading an email from a sweet foreign